Keepers of the Flame

Black Range Fire Manager Toby Richards works the lines of
a prescribed burn on the Gila National Forest in New
Mexico

Michael Berman

On the Black Range District of the Gila National Forest, a
crew uses drip torches to start a controlled burn

Michael Berman

Lawrence Garcia, who in the 1970s, wrote a fire-management
plan for the Gila National Forest, jump-starting three decades of
innovation and restoration

Courtesy Gila National Forest

Visitors to Old Faithful Lodge and Geyser in July 1988,
with the North Fork Fire burning behind. By summer's end, more than
a third of Yellowstone National Park had burned, sparking a
tremendous backlash against the managers who had let the fires do
so. T

National Park Service

Gila National Forest

Diane Sylvain

The Black Range crew takes a break from fighting a low-key
fire

Michael Berman

Toby Richards in an area his crew has just burned,
removing ground fuels and leaving big trees standing

Michael Berman

Summer storm on the Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho,
where Fire Use is part of the management strategy

GILA NATIONAL FOREST, New Mexico — In April
2003, a thunderstorm built over southwestern New Mexico’s
Black Range. Clouds darkened the skies above soft-shouldered hills
and steep canyons covered by dense thickets of juniper and
piñon pine and galleries of tall ponderosa pine. Sometime
around 2:00 in the afternoon, lightning struck on Boiler Peak,
northwest of Truth or Consequences. The blast shattered a
60-foot-tall ponderosa, and flames flickered into life amid the
splinters.

The Boiler Fire, as it came to be known,
spread through the open parks and woodlands, slowly at first, but
then with increasing strength. Within a month, it had burned across
some 20,000 acres.

We’ve become accustomed to
seeing wildfire as a horrific force. On television, it thunders
through Western forests like an angry King Kong, devouring towns
for breakfast, swatting aside slurry bombers like so many gnats.
Wildfire is the summer blockbuster, the monster movie that is
guaranteed to rivet our butts to the theater seats.

Yet
reality on the ground in the Gila was something entirely different.
When I visited the Gila in May — the first of several visits
I would make to the forest over the next year and a half —
the fire was still burning, but I found no drama, no threatened
towns, no camera crews or reporters.

Through the haze, I
could see wavelets of flame moving across a tawny meadow. Heavy
pieces of deadfall smoldered. Fire shimmered up the thick bark of a
few ponderosas. Smoke curled out of holes in the ground where small
trees had been reduced to ash right down to their roots.

No planes. No water trucks. No yellow-shirted, be-helmeted
firefighters in the middle of some dramatic moment of triage. Not a
soul in sight.

Just smoke in the air and fire moving
around in the grass.

When I caught up with Black Range
Fire Manager Toby Richards, he was relaxed and low-key. One of his
crews had just cleared a fire line to contain a small flare-up, and
everyone was gathered in a circle. Some firefighters took off their
helmets to wipe sweaty, soot-smeared foreheads. Others were passing
around a bag of chewing tobacco.

Around us, the fire
inhaled as it searched for carbon chains to unravel among the piles
of needles and logs. Walkie-talkies and nearby truck radios
sputtered in short bursts of static.

I asked the crew how
intense this fire was, on a scale of one to 10. After a long
silence, someone leaned outside the circle to spit. Richards, a
bearded 37-year-old, cleared his throat.

"
‘Ten’ is battling the blazes in the urban-wildland
interface, dude. That’s like Rodeo-Chediski," the devastating
wildfire that burned over 400 structures and scorched a record
462,614 acres in Arizona the previous year. "This is like… a
‘one.’ "

And yet this low-key fire in the
middle of rural New Mexico had huge implications for the national
firefighting juggernaut. When it finally stopped smoldering in late
August, the Boiler Fire had burned 58,000 acres — roughly 90
square miles. Meanwhile, on the Gila’s neighboring wilderness
district that same summer, another fire, the Dry Lakes Complex,
covered 98,000 acres — the third-largest fire in New Mexico
history.

What was remarkable about these fires was not
the acreage they burned. The remarkable thing was that the Forest
Service didn’t try to stop them. While the federal government
spent $1.3 billion in 2003 putting fires out, the Gila National
Forest quietly moved forward with a program it began almost three
decades ago — allowing fire to return to its natural place on
the land.

Welcome to the world of "Fire Use." It may not
be as sexy or sensational as the massive, hard-fought fires that
torch towns and occasionally claim lives. But with billions of tax
dollars consumed annually on suppression tactics, even as land
managers struggle to restore natural fire to the landscape, Fire
Use might be the most promising land-management technique Western
forests have ever had.

Flash back to 1975, when a young
fire manager named Lawrence Garcia was riding through the Gila
Wilderness Area on horseback with his boss, Don Webb, the
Gila’s fire management officer. Garcia recalls that both he
and Webb were concerned about the dense, dog-haired and flammable
thickets of trees that flanked both sides of the trail.

"I remember saying to Don, ‘How are we going to deal with all
these trees? We’re not going to log them, not in a wilderness
area,’ " Garcia says today. "Don turned to me and said,
‘We’re going to do it with fire. And you’re going
to write the plan.’ "

Just 22 years old at the
time, Lawrence Garcia wrote one of the nation’s first
fire-management plans, basing his ideas about what the forest
needed on his observations as a firefighter. He wrote the plan as
the nation’s view of fire was in a period of rapid change.

As far back as the 1960s, land managers had recognized
that forests without regular fires were increasingly explosive when
they did burn, and that fires were the key to healthy watersheds,
especially in the Southwest. In 1968, the National Park Service had
adopted a policy known as "Prescribed Natural Fire," which allowed
the agency to manage rather than suppress natural fires, within
certain limits. The Forest Service had followed suit in 1972.

But having a policy and putting it to work in the forest
are two different things. Prescribed Natural Fire conflicted with
another agency rule, the "10 a.m. policy," which held that fire
managers were obligated to control all fires by 10:00 the morning
after they ignited (HCN, 4/23/01: The Big Blowup). In the trenches,
Prescribed Natural Fire also bumped up against the firefighting
rank and file, who tended to view wildfire as dangerous and
unmanageable.
So it was no surprise that on the Gila,
Garcia was cautious. His plan allowed the agency to manage natural
fires only in wilderness areas, and only after the summer monsoons
had dampened the forests, ensuring that any fires would be
relatively docile and small.

For the next 20 years,
Garcia and his crew learned to deal with natural fire on a modest
scale, with a few thousand acres burning each summer. Garcia kept a
diary, and tinkered with the plan as he watched fire work. He also
had the foresight to bring in researchers, including a young
student named Tom Swetnam, who had worked for two years as a
seasonal firefighter for Garcia and was starting a graduate program
at the University of Arizona’s Tree Ring Laboratory in
Tucson.

Swetnam looked at the annual growth rings and
fire scars in ponderosa pine trees and found a detailed history of
fire on the Gila. His research provided clues about where the
forest’s fire program needed to go if it was going to return
to something resembling a natural fire regime. The tree rings
showed that historically, fires had burned broadly on the Gila
every four to eight years — and that they’d burned in
the spring, the driest time of the year.

Garcia says he
had already been turning over in his mind the notion of managing
larger, hotter spring fires. But his boss, Don Webb, wasn’t
ready to make that leap. Yet.

"I remember talking to
Lawrence (Garcia) and Don (Webb), and telling them that they needed
to allow these fires in the spring, when nature did," says Swetnam
today. "Don turned to me and said, ‘Well maybe so, but we
ain’t gonna do that.’ "

Convincing land
managers — to say nothing of the general public — that
it was a good idea to let forests burn, and burn hot, would be a
tricky business.

"The early pioneers of Fire Use were
regarded as nothing less than fringe lunatics," recalls Tim Sexton,
currently the Fire Use program officer for the U.S. Forest Service.
"And even into the ’70s, it was seen as heresy by some to let
things burn — a violation of our creed as firefighters."

Early conflagrations — such as the 1979
Independence Fire, which burned for two and a half months on
Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest — slowed things
down, too. "We almost burned down a ranger station," says Charlie
Elliott, who spent 27 years on the Clearwater before transferring
to the Gila in 2003. "It was a fire that started on July 4, and
normally, we didn’t let fires start that early in the
season."

The Yellowstone Fires of 1988 were the most
notable Prescribed Natural Fire event of this period. The spectacle
of those fires blazing across 793,000 acres in the crown jewel of
the national park system, broadcast on television screens across
the country, brought on a tremendous backlash against those who had
invoked the policy. Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, R, called for the
resignation of Yellowstone Park Superintendent Bob Barbee.

The Forest Service’s funding structure also
encouraged ambivalence. Fire-suppression funding was distributed
annually from an ever-growing pot of funds, sanctioned under the
rubric of disaster relief. Local managers who used Prescribed
Natural Fire tactics, in contrast, paid for it out of their own
program budgets.

This meant that any managers who wanted
to increase the gains made by natural fires had to be creative. On
the Gila, managers sometimes used a so-called "containment
strategy," in which fires were surrounded and allowed to burn
within a given area. Forest Service rules say a containment
strategy cannot be used for ecological reasons; its main rationales
are to conserve money or protect firefighters. Nonetheless, it
allowed the Gila to let fire revisit the landscape without draining
its coffers.

"What we were saying to ourselves then,
though not publicly, was, ‘Hey, the watersheds don’t
know the difference,’ " recalls Paul Boucher, the current
fire staff officer for the Gila.

The result was that,
within 20 years, the 900,000-acre wilderness district, which
includes the Gila and Aldo Leopold wilderness areas, saw fire over
60 percent of its area at least once. Some areas burned as many as
three times. With many of the thirsty trees out of the way, the
watersheds rebounded. "In some cases, we saw springs flow again
that hadn’t run in quite some time," says Boucher.

This kind of dramatic rebirth in the forests ushered in a new
generation of managers who wanted to push wildfire management even
further.

Toby Cash Richards was raised on the northern
border of the Gila National Forest in the remote town of Reserve.
"During the day, 10 minutes wouldn’t go by without a truck
full of logs going through the center of town," Richards recalls.
"I liked to hunt and hike. I wanted to be a logger."

But
just as Richards graduated from high school in 1985, Catron County
underwent an enormous transformation. The local logging industry
crashed, and the county became a battleground over the threatened
Mexican spotted owl. The number of mills in the area dwindled, and
in 1990 the shutdown of the Stone Forest Industries’ sawmill
in Reserve — a real as well as a symbolic blow to the
community — turned the area into a hotbed for the sagebrush
rebellion (HCN, 6/24/96: Catron County’s politics heat up as
its land goes bankrupt).

Richards went away to college in
Las Cruces, where he majored in education, and spent several years
in Truth or Consequences, teaching second- and eighth-graders. But
he kept his connection with the Gila, returning each summer to work
as a seasonal firefighter. In 1995, he hired on full time with the
Black Range District. His timing couldn’t have been better.

In the early 1990s, two things had changed the way the
Gila dealt with wildfire. One was that Gila managers rewrote their
fire plan to allow fires earlier in the season, before the monsoon
cycle had started, thus paving the way toward larger managed fires.

The Gila immediately saw results. The Bonner Fire, which
started in May 1995, burned for six weeks and covered 27,000 acres
in the wilderness. In some places, the fire climbed into the forest
canopy and killed trees, and in others it merely moved along the
forest floor, clearing out deadfall. It left behind a mosaic of new
meadows, making room for aspen trees, bunchgrasses, forbs,
currants, wild roses and raspberries that had been choked out by
decades of pine needles.

"To many people, those blackened
trees are symbols of death," says Paul Boucher. "What they
don’t see is the hundredfold increase in species diversity
that follows a fire."

The other shift was national: In
1995, the Agriculture and Interior departments retired the
Prescribed Natural Fire policy and established a new one called
Wildland Fire Use for Resource Benefit — or "Fire Use" for
short. The 1995 National Fire Plan made the restoration of wildland
fire a national priority, placing it second only to human safety.
And equally as important, it spurred a change in the way wildfire
management was funded. Unlike the old policy, Fire Use could draw
its funding from the deep pockets of the national fire-suppression
budget. Because its application was limited to the few national
forests with a fire plan in place, the new policy brought a stream
of money to forests such as Gila.

The Gila was poised to
take its fire strategy forestwide, and Toby Richards was the
perfect guy to help make it happen. From the seasoned line officers
on the Black Range, Richards had learned techniques and practices
for prescribed fires, which are set intentionally. He worked on
forest-thinning projects around private land and adjacent to towns.
And during fire season he traveled to big suppression fires across
the country, working side by side with some of the best Type I
commanders in the Forest Service. (Type I commanders are the cream
of the crop, capable of handling the trickiest, most dangerous
fires.) This gave Richards a feel for fire, from understanding risk
assessment and firefighter safety to using terrain and man-made
barriers.

"He worked on a helitack crew, on an engine
crew, as a hot shot," says Lawrence Garcia, who now works on the
Santa Fe National Forest. "You know, we say in order to be a good
fire manager, you have to breathe a lot of smoke. Toby’s
breathed a lot of smoke."

As a practice, Fire Use also
appealed to Richards’ native love of working in the woods, as
well as his sense that the land needed to be brought back into
balance. He had absorbed many of the lessons of fire ecology
firsthand, in the same woods where he grew up hunting and fishing.
"A lot of times, you go out to an area that’s seen fire, even
two weeks later, and you can see the green plants coming up through
the black," he says.

By the time Richards took over as
fire management officer for the Black Range in 2001, the district
had seen plenty of fire — over 50,000 acres of prescribed
burning, and 10 Fire Use fires, ranging in size from a few hundred
acres to over 10,000. The Black Range was ready for something big.

In April 2003, when Richards learned about the Boiler
Fire, he immediately saw it as a good candidate for Fire Use. The
ignition point on Boiler Peak lay in the midst of a patchwork of
forest that had been burned by numerous smaller fires in previous
years. Roads crisscrossed much of the country, making it easy to
work in.

But the district had never managed a fire so
early in the season, and Richards recognized that this one could
get large. "When you start in April, you’re looking at three,
even four months of management," he told me. "A lot can happen in
that time. You gotta be able to stay two weeks ahead of the fire."

Richards watched the fire closely, monitoring the
weather, anticipating the areas where it would find fuel and become
active. The Black Range crew defined the perimeter of the fire by
burning a fire line around the outer border of where it was
allowed, something known in Fire Use parlance as the Maximum
Manageable Area. Within the perimeter, they protected
archaeological ruins and headed off the fire when it moved toward
an area where a local rancher grazed his livestock. They pre-burned
dense stands of spruce and fir trees to protect critical nesting
habitat for the Mexican spotted owl, working in the cool of the
evening, backing fire down slopes with drip torches.

"Fighting fires, you learn how to move them around, how to herd
them, and how to keep them from getting into places you don’t
want them to go," Richards said.

At times, the Black
Range crew merely monitored the Boiler Fire and worked on other
projects. At other times, when the fire became more active,
Richards brought in crews from as far away as California and
Oregon. "When things are really happening, you can be managing a
fire over here, and putting one out over there, and lighting one
somewhere else," Richards said.

Richards is quick to
credit his superiors, his crew and his many mentors for the Fire
Use successes on the Black Range. "It takes a whole group on the
same page to do this kind of thing," he says. But those who work
with Richards insist that his skills as a fire manager are
remarkable.

"Toby’s the quarterback," says Mark
Hedge, a teacher from Truth or Consequences who works summers in
one of the Black Range lookout towers. "It’s amazing to sit
up in the tower and listen to the radio traffic when a fire is
really cooking. It’s like a football game. And Toby’s
in the middle, holding it all together."

On the Boiler,
Richards and his crew used the traditions of teamwork and safety
handed down from the fire suppression establishment. But the ethos
of Garcia and Webb was there as well. The Black Range crew allowed
the fire to burn wherever and whenever possible, and used the
powerful, expensive tools of suppression only sparingly.

One morning at a briefing, a crew boss told about visiting a site
where air tankers had dumped a huge amount of slurry on a small
fire. Richards used the story to make a point: "We may throw a load
of retardant before someone gets there to slow something down,"
Richards said. "But we’re not gonna load and return, load and
return, load and return and spend $50,000 on slurry, for a 10-acre
fire. So I want you incident commanders to be careful with the
slurry, so I don’t get my ass chewed out."

The
Boiler Fire burned for five months, and by the time it fizzled out
in August, it had become the largest Fire Use fire ever to burn
outside of a wilderness area. In the end, Richards and his
superiors deemed it a success. It killed tiny seedlings invading
open parklands, reduced logs and deadfall to ash, and torched out
small areas of young matchstick pine trees in what would become new
meadows.

By effectively managing fire within the Mexican
spotted owl nesting areas, Richards says the district strengthened
its relationship with the Fish and Wildlife Service. And a team of
young firefighters learned how to use fire as a restoration tool.

But perhaps the most remarkable success could be seen in
the Boiler Fire’s cost. In the realm of "fuel treatment,"
prescribed fire can run $100-$200 per acre on average, while
suppression fires cost at least $500-$600 an acre. Thinning trees
with chain saws and other mechanical equipment tops the list at
$1,000 or more for every acre treated.

Managing the
Boiler Fire cost taxpayers just $1.30 per acre.

In 2003,
a record 330,000 acres were allowed to burn under Wildland Fire Use
nationwide. Close to half of those acres were on the Gila National
Forest.

A handful of other forests, mostly in the
Northern Rockies, put the Fire Use policy to work. But only one
program besides the Gila’s — on the Clearwater-Nez
Perce national forests in Idaho — practices Fire Use on a
landscape level outside the relative safety of wilderness areas.
Ken Stump, the acting fire management officer for the
Clearwater-Nez Perce Fire Zone, says 2003 was a busy year for him,
too. No less than 12 teams were on his forests, managing 41 fires.
Stump says that Fire Use and containment strategies saved upwards
of $25 million on his forests that year.

One wonders why
this success story hasn’t been more widely repeated, or why
the Forest Service doesn’t spend more than a fraction of 1
percent of its annual firefighting budget on Fire Use. Most of the
money still funnels into the federal suppression machine, which,
since 2000, has spent an average of $1.3 billion annually (HCN,
5/26/03: A losing battle).

For an answer, one need look
no further than the Cerro Grande Fire of 2000, where a prescribed
fire escaped from Bandelier National Monument and torched hundreds
of houses in Los Alamos, N.M. (HCN, 6/5/00: More trouble waits in
the wings). Black eyes such as these are still vivid in the
collective memory. And while many citizens might have an abstract
appreciation for the notion of fire in the woods, they don’t
want to breathe smoke. Add to that the protection of endangered
species habitat and private property, and the extra public outreach
and hard work required to manage a fire for months during the most
volatile part of the year, and it’s easy to see why many
managers are more comfortable calling in the air attack to put a
fire out.

"Most people don’t have the intestinal
fortitude," says Steve Servis, a retired fire management officer
for the Gila. "And believe me, when you’ve got a fire burning
out there in the middle of fire season, and you wake up in the
middle of the night to find your window curtains sticking straight
out from the wind, it sends a chill down your neck."

"It’s all risk and no reward," agrees the Gila’s Paul
Boucher. "Because you know that if something goes wrong, the
bean-counters and the witch-hunters are going to come down, and
somebody’s going to lose his job."

Boucher looks
forward to the day when the pressure points are reversed. "Things
have to change to where line officers are held accountable for not
implementing Fire Use — where people are held accountable for
going into suppression mode," he says.

But spreading Fire
Use Westwide means confronting the fact that fire burns differently
in the dozens of different forests in the region. What has worked
in one type of forest won’t necessarily apply elsewhere (HCN,
7/7/03: As fires rage, governors counsel discretion). Southwestern
ponderosa pine forests burned frequently, with low-intensity fires.
Other forests, such as the lodgepole pine forests throughout the
Rocky Mountains and the Douglas-fir forests along the West Coast,
burned infrequently — but often burned to the ground in
"stand-replacing fires." Many forest ecologists caution that
working in large areas of unbroken forest where stand-replacement
fires were the norm may prove tricky.

Norm Christenson, a
forest ecologist at Duke University, is enthusiastic about the
progress in places like the Gila, where he says the topography and
structure of the land lends itself to fire management. But he
cautions that in other forest types, and in areas that are more
populated, Fire Use gets dicey.

"Southern California is
not a good place for Fire Use," Christenson says. "The conditions
are so volatile that there are hardly ever the right circumstances
to allow a (Fire Use fire), or even a prescribed fire. The
liabilities are just too great."

Jerry Franklin, a
forestry professor at the University of Washington, worries that
big old trees could also go up in smoke. "It might be the natural
thing to do, but we could lose the last remaining remnants of
old-growth forest in the Northwest," says Franklin. "The bulk of
our Western landscapes aren’t in the kind of shape where we
can let any (wildfire) do its thing."

Even historian
Stephen Pyne, a self-described "pyromantic" who has spent the
better part of his career arguing for more fire on the landscape,
has some reservations about how widespread Fire Use can
realistically get. He’s concerned that where fire was once
viewed as evil, some people now think it can do no wrong. "We
don’t want to invert one fire fundamentalism for another," he
says.

But the Gila's shift in policy has hardly been
driven by fundamentalism. The nation as a whole puts out 99 percent
of its fires, while the Gila still puts out 98 percent on average.
Still, over time, that 1 percent difference has amounted to a
tremendous shift in forest ecology and fire behavior.

Tom
Swetnam, the tree-ring scientist, says the severity of fires on the
Gila has been relatively mild as a result of Fire Use. "The Gila
stands out," he says. "Virtually all the other large landscapes of
the Southwest have had massive blowouts. I mean, you can go to
where the Cerro Grande Fire burned, and find areas of 6,000 acres
where there wasn't a single living thing left."

For his
part, veteran fire manager Lawrence Garcia believes natural fires
can be managed in almost any area, provided that the program is
developed with the modest, patient approach he used 30 years ago on
the Gila. He says the key is to protect communities and homes by
thinning trees and clearing brush. Managers also need to break up
the forest into a mosaic with small Fire Use and prescribed fires,
he says, so that when it does burn, it doesn't all go at once.

"You just gotta start slow," Garcia says.

Early
one afternoon in June 2004, Toby Richards and I drive toward Emory
Pass on the southern end of the Black Range District. He shows me
the small town of Kingston, where part of his crew has been
thinning piñon and juniper trees with chain saws and burning
slash piles to reduce the risk of losing houses to a forest fire.
It's an expensive project, but it's an important piece of Richards'
plan to deal with the last 20 percent of the district that hasn't
seen significant fires.

Near the pass, Richards points to
a small reddish-brown blotch in the otherwise green forest canopy.
Lightning had sparked a fire there a few weeks earlier, but rather
than let it burn, he'd called in an air attack and a Type I crew
from Prescott to put it out. The Gila forest supervisor called him
onto the carpet to explain his decision-making. "We couldn't afford
to let that one go," Richards says. "We weren't ready."

This part of Richards' district is different from what I'd seen to
the north. The canyons leading up to the ridgeline are deeper, and
filled with dense stands of ponderosa and other conifers. It's a
tinderbox waiting to blow. I realize that Richards was lucky this
fire hadn't gotten away. I look back toward the town of Kingston,
wondering if a fire in here would blast right through the thinning
work his crew has done.

"How are you ever going to deal
with this?" I ask. "There's so much fuel in there."

Richards responds with quiet certainty. "Just like we did on the
north end of the district, dude," he says. "Start small and chip
away at it. It'll take the rest of my career to get it all done."

A few switchbacks later, he admits he's been fortunate:
"This area's gonna go someday. I just hope we can do a few things
in here before it does."

I am suddenly overwhelmed with
the enormity of the task facing Richards. I wouldn't want to be the
person who has to decide which fires should burn and which ones
shouldn't. And I realize that every piece of public ground in the
West needs someone like Richards - someone humble, cautious,
determined, intimately acquainted with the local landscape, someone
willing to walk the razor's edge between resource protection and
fire ecology. He's part of an insightful and distinguished tribe -
the Gila firefighters - an organization that combines a century's
worth of fire suppression experience with a fierce desire to do
what's right for the land.

The tribe is growing, albeit
slowly. So far in 2004, just 124,588 acres have burned under Fire
Use, but many of those fires involved forests that were
implementing Fire Use for the first time, according to Paul
Boucher. Even California, known for stubbornly stamping out fires
whenever possible, allowed 25,000 acres to burn.

This
fall, forest managers across the West are mandated to develop new
fire plans - policies that will help give Fire Use a major boost in
the coming decade, according to Tim Sexton. As they craft these
plans, fire managers can look to the story of the Gila, which
proves that, with time, patience and leadership, every national
forest can learn to work with fire, rather than just attacking it.

It's getting there that's the trick, of course. But then
again, 30 years ago, we hadn't even decided where "there" was. Now
we know: It's a future where fire in our forests is not an
otherworldly spectacle or a media sensation, but a commonplace
event, as unremarkable as the trees and the grass.

Adam Burke writes from Paonia, Colorado. He came across
Toby Richards when he was producer of Radio High Country
News.

This story was funded by a
grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation, based in Santa Fe, New
Mexico.